"Microsoft has released new previews of two of its server products: the first beta of the new cloud-based Small Business Server Aurora, and an updated beta of the second version of Windows Home Server, codenamed 'Vail'."

What turned me off from the first version was how they implemented drive extender (their storage management system) and the limitations imposed. Now with Vail, it seems that they've switched to the block level storage based pools like traditional software raid, plus with these goodies:

- File system level encryption (EFS) and compression are now supported for Drive Extender folders.

- iSCSI storage devices can be added to the a storage pool.

- Data drives in storage pools can be migrated between servers, and appear as a non-default pool. A non-default pool can be promoted to a default pool if no default pool exists.

- To protect against silent storage errors (bit flips, misdirected writes, torn writes), additional information is appended to each 512-byte sector stored on drive. In particular, each sector is protected by a CRC checksum, which enables Drive Extender to detect data read errors, perform realtime error correction and self-healing (up to 2 bit errors per sector if duplication is disabled, and any number of bit errors if duplication is enabled) and report the errors back to the user and application. The overhead for this additional data is roughly 12% of drive space.